I'm just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party, but I searched on here and didn't see much follow up discussion about it after the review thread. I'm also trying to submit more to Lemmy so the communities can grow, so I thought I'd bring it back up now that it has been out for a few weeks.
I only just bought Baldurs Gate 3 this week and finally got time to sit down and play it tonight for the first time really and I am so impressed. The character creator allows so much character expression. I made a generic red Tiefling and when I saw there was an option to add vitiligo, I immediately built out a head canon where my character is a Tiefling that is slowly being transformed into a human by a curse from his past. I never would have thought of a character like this, but the character creator just provided some pretty unique designs and options.
Everything just feels so polished. I've played Pathfinder Kingmaker before this and parts of Wasteland 2, but I've never been much of a CRPG fan. I feel like the user interface in this game is a lot easier to follow and read. It's especially nice because I played in co-op with a friend that doesn't play much in the way of RPGs and has only ever played tabletop D&D once and he was able to easily slot in and start figuring out how things work together and where everything in the UI was. It was very entry-level friendly for our experience and it made the entire experience a lot better.
Also it's kind of a weird thing but I'm really impressed with the facial animations so far. I was expecting Bioware or Bethesda style faces where their lips move, but their faces are otherwise lifeless. I've been loving seeing the character seemingly actually move their eyebrows and their jaws when they're speaking.
I'm not super far into the game since I've only had time today to play it, but I'm super excited to play more when I get the chance.
What have your experiences been like? Any fun stories or characters you've made?
I'm not sure if I'm enjoying it yet. I'm only 4 hours in and it feels like Divinity Original Sin 3 and not a Baldur's Gate game. Maybe that's fine, but it's not what I was expecting.
The combat seems more complicated and I'm having to rest after even basic encounters, but I guess that's the way BG1 was too.
Still messing with the graphics settings to get it to look decent and run ~60FPS on my creaky old Vega 56.
The combat becomes much better when you gain some levels. Early you only have few spell slots and cool bonus actions. I can assure you it gets better the longer you keep going, especially if you loot all the usable consumables (scrolls, arrows, etc)